Trial by Blood

by John Macken

  ‘Sir?’ she said. ‘Shall I continue?’

  Abner frowned. DCI Hirst. Young, ambitious and dangerous. Difficult to judge, up to things she shouldn’t be, exactly the kind of person Charlie Baker should be keeping an eye on.

  ‘Go on,’ he muttered.

  ‘So, Judith is at home, shaken but OK, badly bruised neck, under twenty-four-hour guard.’

  ‘Same kind of neck wounds as the corpses?’ Abner asked.

  ‘It appears so. Steve?’

  The young pathologist with short cropped hair shuffled in his chair. Commander Abner noticed that he didn’t look directly at him, which was good. Most of GeneCrime were still uncomfortable in his presence, which pleased Abner a lot. His large, imposing frame, the distance he kept, his terse pronouncements, all these had helped. And he knew that this might come in handy in the following weeks.

  ‘I examined her a couple of hours after the attack. It’s difficult to be one hundred per cent before the bruising develops more fully. But yes, I think it’s probably the same shape of hand and angle of attack. From behind, finger marks along the length of the trachea.’

  Sarah glanced at Commander Abner, then back at the scientists and police in front of her.

  ‘We can’t neglect the possibility that we are somehow the target now,’ she continued. ‘When someone working on a case is attacked . . . well, you know what I’m saying.’

  ‘What about the other police officer?’ Abner scanned his notes, double-checking the name and rank. ‘Detective Inspector Tamasine Ashcroft. Did she ever have any dealings with GeneCrime?’

  ‘We think she may have had some minor contact with the unit. Nothing unusual, and therefore hard to make a link. Plus, we haven’t been able to find anything in her recent caseload that could have explained her death.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Kimberly Horwitz, American citizen, working over here in banking. Laura Beckman, a postgraduate student – but remember, there was no sign of rape, just crush injuries to the ribs. Joanne Harringdon, a partner in a general practice. And our still as yet unidentified first one. Five women who seem almost entirely different, and in no specific way linked to Judith, who nearly became number six.’

  ‘So these could still just be random attacks, women in the wrong place at the wrong time?’ Abner bit hard into the end of his biro and grimaced at Sarah. ‘I’m playing devil’s advocate here.’

  ‘I appreciate that, sir. And what you say is right, apart from Judith. I can’t help but think the answer lies with her. It can’t be pure coincidence.’

  Commander Abner turned his attention to Mina Ali, senior forensic technician, who was sitting opposite. So far, he was pleased with Mina’s appointment. She was entirely focused on one case at a time, and didn’t go poking her nose where it wasn’t wanted. Not like the previous incumbent. Commander Abner shut Reuben Maitland out of his thoughts and asked, ‘Mina, how is the inspection of Judith’s clothing panning out?’

  Mina Ali beamed bright, as if she had been saving her news, letting CID waste their breath with half-baked supposition. She looked to Commander Abner like she had been up most of the night and would soon need some rest. But for now, she was obviously too excited to feel the fatigue.

  ‘I have something,’ she said.

  Abner watched CID sit up, a couple of them straightening in their seats. Since Maitland had left and she had been appointed in his place, the pressure had seemed to grind into her. And with no definitive DNA from the five bodies, Mina had been tearing her long black hair out. But now he guessed she had something positive to say.

  ‘We have DNA,’ she stated. ‘Two hairs caught in the zip of Judith’s motorcycle jacket. We’re extracting them at the moment. But we’re sure they’re his.’

  ‘How?’ Abner asked curtly.

  ‘They don’t match hairs from Judith, her husband Colm, anyone in the lab, or any other people Judith can recall spending time with yesterday. The hairs had to have physically got caught in the zipper; they didn’t float there by accident. We’re ninety per cent on this one.’

  ‘Fine. We’ll see.’

  ‘But you know what we should do now?’ Mina continued.

  ‘What?’

  ‘As soon as we have a profile and are throwing it through the searches, we should send a sample to Reuben Maitland.’

  ‘Why would we want to do that?’ Charlie Baker asked, suddenly attentive.

  Abner peered over at him, still trying to sum the DI up, and decide whether he had made the right choice of informant within the division. Difficult to tell, but he seemed loyal enough so far.

  ‘Get a visual, in case we don’t get any matches.’

  ‘You mean via his predictive phenotyping?’ Baker said.

  Mina blinked a couple of times and answered, ‘Yes.’

  Commander Abner bit the inside of his cheek. Here was the moment he had waited for.

  ‘You reckon that will help, Mina?’ he asked.

  ‘It can’t hurt us. Could save a few days, by which time—’

  ‘Another strangled corpse in the morgue,’ Robert Abner mumbled. He tried not to appear too keen on the idea. ‘OK. Now this is tricky. Maitland is the subject of an ongoing manhunt by our colleagues in the wider Met. We know that he’s clearly in hiding somewhere. But if we could get him to perform his specialist analysis for us . . . Well, you understand what I’m saying. The lesser of two evils and all that.’ Abner turned his large hands over, palms upwards, as if illustrating the balancing act. ‘And the Met don’t need to hear that we’ve been in contact with someone they’re actively pursuing. So, who’s currently in touch with him? Anyone? Sarah?’

  ‘Not recently,’ Sarah answered.

  Commander Abner’s intuition told him she had replied too quickly. He stared hard at her, wondering what the story was, and knowing that Maitland was out of harm’s way now.

  ‘Well, ring him,’ he said.

  Sarah nodded, a stiff and rapid movement of her tightly pinned hair. ‘I’ll try him later.’

  Robert Abner felt a surge of anger. ‘Now.’

  He watched Sarah take her mobile out, scroll through a long list of contacts and dial his number. He pictured Maitland’s phone in a drawer in his lab, and Maitland himself in the forest lock-up. Once again, he cursed his luck that the fucking scientist had been led towards investigating Michael Brawn, digging into things he would never understand, stumbling into truths that must never surface. He remembered the feel of the Smith and Wesson, still warm from Reuben’s hand, pulling the trigger, the heavy jolt, the dispatching of Michael Brawn, the solving of a problem. Nothing, Abner was well aware, solved a problem like a bullet. Small pieces of lead fracturing and ricocheting, tearing through flesh and ending disputes.

  Sarah raised her eyebrows, showing that the number was at least ringing. Abner scrutinized the occupants of the room. Bright and serious coppers and forensic scientists. But none of them with the balls to truly make it. The guts to go all the way. The fight to get where he had got. He tried to hide his contempt, checking the clock again. Nine twenty. A series of meetings beckoned, press briefings, senior brass, liaising with other forces. A day of telling partial truths and careful lies.

  ‘Answer machine, sir,’ DCI Hirst announced.

  ‘Keep trying,’ Abner instructed. He visualized the inside of the concrete outbuilding, flashed through some of the previous events that had occurred there and tried to sound upbeat about Maitland, who was spending his last few days on earth in utter pain and misery. Shooting him straight away would have been too kind. Waiting until his son was dead, that was where the fun was. A nice touch which had kept him warm inside all the way back to London. ‘Be good to get Reuben’s input into this.’ It was as much as he could do not to smile to himself.

  Soon, it would be time to take DS Cumali Kyriacou and ACC James Truman back there, to sort out what needed to be done, to solve another problem, to close another door, to finish what needed to be finished.

&n
bsp; 15

  At least this one probably knew what he was talking about. Lucy had witnessed enough medics, architects, accountants and other so-called professionals being cross-examined in court to know that even the most highly qualified of them was just two or three questions away from complete ignorance. Ask the right questions and you could trip anyone up. There was an art to it, a method of countering generalities with specifics, and specifics with generalities. Lucy yawned and shook her head, her dark bob swaying, a stiff movement signifying the liberal application of hairspray. Stop thinking like a fucking lawyer, she told herself. Listen to what he says, and what he can do to help you.

  The consultant was standing unbearably close, a balding man, fit and clean-shaven, positively bristling with irritating good health. His name tag read Professor C. S. Berry. Lucy suspected he was on the young side to have progressed so far in paediatric medicine, and saw this as a good thing.

  ‘So, then, Mrs Maitland,’ he said, glancing up from his pager, which had just sounded, ‘as my colleague intimated yesterday, this is serious. The diagnosis has come rather late in the day. You said he’d been ill for some time?’

  ‘Just nursery stuff, you know.’ Lucy stifled another yawn, her eyes watering, a restless night proving hard to shake. ‘The usual random infection on top of random infection.’

  ‘And for how long?’

  ‘A few months. I don’t know. We never thought it might be—’

  ‘We’re not here to play the blame game. But we’re going to need to be aggressive. We now have all the bloods back from the lab, and are pretty sure of where we’re at.’

  ‘Pretty sure?’

  Professor Berry smiled quickly, almost a twitch. ‘OK, we’re very sure. His best chance is an intensive course of chemotherapy coupled with marrow donation. Now we’ve been checking our database for matches and have drawn a blank. I understand the biological father is out of the picture?’

  Not this again. Lucy grimaced. Did these medics not talk to one another?

  ‘The biological father . . . it’s not that simple.’

  ‘I see.’ Professor Berry’s eyebrows raised, disrupting the smooth skin of his retreating hairline.

  ‘I mean, there’s a fair chance that Joshua’s father . . .’ Lucy took a deep breath, telling herself to lower her defences for once. ‘Look, I don’t feel good about this. But when Joshua was conceived, well, there was another man on the scene.’

  The consultant flicked back through his notes, the same pages that had so occupied his junior colleague the previous day. ‘And this would be Shaun Graves?’

  ‘But his tests came back negative. So he can’t be the biological father, right?’

  ‘Just because he’s not a good donor match doesn’t mean he’s not the father. But this other man . . .’

  ‘Reuben Maitland, my husband. Technically at least.’

  ‘He could be the father?’

  Lucy Maitland dragged her high-heeled shoe along the shiny floor. This was verging on a cross-examination, and she was not happy to find herself on the wrong side of it. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s possible.’

  ‘How possible?’

  ‘Just possible. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘Look, without prying too much, you’re saying that you aren’t sure who the biological father of Joshua is? This could be important.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Lucy snapped. ‘Do you think I haven’t obsessed about this since he was born? Do you think this doesn’t matter to me?’

  She peered over at Joshua. He was taking quick shallow breaths, but other than that, other than the fact that he was hooked up to several machines in a ward full of sickly kids, you wouldn’t know that he was so ill. And as for the other question, how did you tell? How did you really work it out, without resorting to the kind of methods even Reuben wouldn’t perform on Joshua? After all, what parents could recognize with one hundred per cent certainty visible characteristics that had emanated from them? Particularly when children changed so quickly, when hair colour was a continuum throughout life, and eye colour could alter until two, and the gaining and losing of weight could bend and stretch your features so profoundly. Shaun had thankfully assumed that Joshua was his, in his seemingly black-and-white take on the world. But Lucy knew that Reuben was still fixated and that she couldn’t rule the possibility out. She looked back at the consultant, who was chewing on a pen, frowning at the notes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What really matters at the moment is getting him tested.’

  ‘OK. I understand.’

  ‘Then, if he is a good match, the treatment options we can pursue will be much more aggressive and likely to work. The percentages will shift dramatically from where they currently are. And where they are currently is not very good.’

  ‘I’ll do everything I can.’ Lucy scratched her scalp irritably, the thick stickiness of the hairspray fixing to her fingers. ‘Trouble is, I haven’t been able to get hold of him for a day or so.’

  The consultant placed a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, and she fought the urge to shrug it off. ‘I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this, but time is marching on. You’d better find him. He’s our best hope. Or else . . .’

  ‘Or what?’ Lucy asked, her eyes narrowing.

  The consultant didn’t answer. He squeezed her shoulder twice, let go and walked off, the warning in what he didn’t say, the threat in the way he averted his eyes.

  16

  The first twenty-four hours, Reuben had attacked the walls and floor and ceiling with coins, shoes, even his watch. He was frantic and impulsive, speeding without amphetamine, snatching rest between bouts of frenzied activity, a myriad of unsettling notions driving him on. He bled and swore and screamed, furious and desperate, a caged beast. There was a way out. There had to be. There was always a way out.

  By the second morning, amid the slow emergence of a new gloom, Reuben had started to work in shifts. He hadn’t slept, and recognized the queasy signs of exhaustion. His mouth was dry and he was thirsty. He realized he needed a strategy. He had to think logically and focus on the task. He dozed fitfully on the damp floor for two hours, then worked for two hours. On and off, the kind of system that transatlantic rowers use, or the military in extreme conditions. A method of working all day and night in bursts. Scratching and scraping at the walls, choosing a number of sites, testing them out, pursuing the ones where even the most negligible progress seemed possible. Digging around the door hinges, sensing for loose concrete or patches of damp. Urinating in the far corner of the shed, hoping his piss might soak into the surface and make it more vulnerable. Trying not to defecate, fighting it, placating his bowels, knowing that conditions would quickly deteriorate, that flies would find their way in en masse, that the task would become harder.

  The third day saw an intensifying thirst, and a hunger that came and went on waves of tiredness. By the end of it he calculated that he’d gone seventy-two hours without food or water. His palms were cracked, his fingers blistered, his knuckles skinned. A cloud-burst beat down on the roof, making him shiver. He huddled against a wall, wrapping his jacket around him. When it had finished, Reuben crouched by the door. Its rust was immediately in his nose and in his mouth. He extended his tongue until it touched. A tingling metallic twinge, like licking the terminals of a nine-volt battery. But there was moisture, condensation from the rain. Reuben flicked his tongue across the surface. The dry flesh began to rehydrate, cracked furrows filling with the precious droplets. He swallowed, the taste making him gag, his throat sucking down the fluid. Not enough to keep him alive indefinitely, but water all the same.

  Days were measured by thick, shadowy gloom giving way to utter darkness, a browny greyness leaking inevitably into black, and back again. In the murkiness, he saw images, snapshots of the last three weeks. In Commander Abner’s GeneCrime office, Abner with his arm around Reuben’s shoulder, saying, ‘One day, I’m going to come knocking.’ Moray
Carnock holding the tight bundles of fifties from the padded envelope, saying, ‘Someone wants this guy bad.’ Kieran Hobbs in the dingy restaurant, saying, ‘My boys will look after you on the inside.’ Flashes of moments and lives. Damian Nightley, hanging from a rope in his prison cell, silent and ended. Leafing through photos of the latest Thames Rapist victims in DCI Sarah Hirst’s car. GeneCrime forensics trying and failing to isolate DNA. A severely wired Michael Brawn running a blade across his tattoo in a Pentonville toilet. Joshua lying asleep in his curtained-off hospital bed. Michael Brawn lying dead on the laboratory floor, staring at Abner in horror. Abner and his colleagues silent in the car, knowing where they were heading and what would happen.

  Reuben paced the building, intense and angry. He muttered to himself, almost delirious. It had to be linked. Everything. There had to be something or someone. Too many people on both sides of the law crossing back and forth again at will. And whoever it was had wanted him involved. Why? To make him vulnerable? To go where they couldn’t? To distract attention from something else? So that he ended up here, in a windowless prison, waiting to die?

  And who would miss him? he wondered. Who would truly grieve for him? A son he hardly knew. An estranged wife who was edging him out of her new life. A brother who blamed him for the break-up of the family. A DCI who kept her feelings bound tight under starched white blouses and angular trouser suits.

  Sarah.

  Controlled and ruthless, but somehow always there. Holding him close, but not too close. Striking, when she smiled. Intoxicating, when she laughed. Sarah Hirst. Something in her eyes sometimes. Lingering a fraction longer than they should, her guard dropping, her cheeks alive with the faintest of blushes. Maybe Sarah would grieve, for a missed opportunity, for a man she could have loved under different circumstances. Reuben allowed the thought to grow, picturing them together, wasting time, wrapped up in each other, her exterior melting, her features blossoming in the summer. The thought held him for several hours as he sat in the dark, the moist air surrounding him and seeming to seep into his body, kept at bay by thoughts of Sarah Hirst.